Wardrobe Makeovers: How To Restyle Your Jeans & Denim for Summer

While I’m not the type of person to cut off all her jeans on the first hot day of the year—I only have two pairs, after all—I can’t help but appreciate the inherent summery-ness of a well-done pair of cutoffs. This summer, transform old jeans, horribly out-of-date jean skirts, and denim yardage into pieces you’ll be rocking all season long.

Summer can be brutal on a pair of jeans, what with all the falling off your bike, exploring the old quarry, climbing trees, and sliding into home. Repair the damage beautifully with Sashiko embroidery and scraps of lovely fabric.

First things first: jean shorts. If you learn well from videos, Cosmopolitan has a step-by-step tutorial that will help you turn your jeans into perfectly distressed, effortless-looking shorts. (Lead image above.)

Refinery29 has you covered for The Basic Daisy Duke, The Destroyed Short-Short, The Double Cuff, and The Distressed Bermuda and helpfully includes which type of jeans works best for each style of shorts.

When you’re contemplating summery cutoffs, “blanket” might not be the first thing that comes to mind—but this tutorial is super cute. The colors of the Mexican blanket they used would look great with an array of bright, poppy tank tops.

This tutorial is perfect for those jeans that simply aren’t salvageable or donate-able. (I always wear holes in the thighs of mine and doubt anyone needs indecent secondhand jeans.) Spray them with bleach to get a cool finish, then follow this detailed tutorial.

Get comfortable with your seam ripper while you rip apart two pairs of jeans. Mindy shows you how to sew them back into the shape of a shirt, with the different washes forming a modern colorblock pattern.

Denim jogging shorts sound hellish to me—jogging?! in denim?!?—but they sure are cute, and there’s no law saying you actually have to jog.

The rural thrift stores where I live are fully stocked with long, button-front denim skirts, and it never occurred to me that they could be transformed into something other than… terrible. This tutorial turns one out-of-style skirt into two cuties: a scalloped version and a split-front.

If you’re really ambitious, you can make a denim dress from scratch. My favorite part of this tutorial is that you use the “wrong” side of the material for a chambray-like look; my least favorite part is the weaving, but to each their own.

These would be so cute on cooler summer days! Pick a pattern that suits your wardrobe and let the power clashing begin.

As a former art student, intentionally splattered clothing always makes me laugh—all my clothes were paint-splattered! Make yourself a practical pair of jorts covered in your favorite colors of the summer.